CNN anchor Jake Tapper opened his program,
"The Lead" on Tuesday chastising presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump over comments he made about the death of Vince Foster, a top aide to President Bill Clinton.
"Once again, journalists are in the unhappy predicament of trying to decide whether and how to cover false allegations raised by a candidate for president of the United States," Tapper said.
"The notion that this was a murder is a fiction born of delusion and untethered to reality and contradicted by evidence reviewed in at least six investigations, one of them by Ken Starr, hardly a Bill Clinton defender," Tapper continued. "To say otherwise is ridiculous, and, frankly, shameful,:
Tapper said his remarks were not intended to be "pro-Clinton" or "anti-Trump," but rather "pro-truth."
Foster's body was found in Fort Marcy Park in July 1993, and his death was ruled a suicide, but conspiracy theories persisted for years that Foster was murdered and he body taken to the park in McLean, Virginia.
Trump,
in an interview published in The Washington Post on Tuesday, called the circumstances surrounding Foster's death "very fishy."
"He [Foster] had intimate knowledge of what was going on," Trump said. "He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide."
But Trump said he prefers not to bring up Foster's death "because I don't know enough to really discuss it. I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don't do that because I don't think it's fair."
"You're right, it's not fair that you did that," Tapper said in remarks addressed directly at Trump, "certainly not to Mr. Foster's widow or their three children."
It was not the first time Tapper has criticized Trump. Earlier this month, he opened his show slamming
Trump's linkage of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's father to the JFK assassination.
"This latest episode started this morning when Trump cited a bizarre and completely uncorroborated report – and I use the term 'report' loosely –in the National Enquirer, the supermarket tabloid," Tapper said at the time.
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